This is the full transcript from the CFVG quarterly meeting on May 5, 2025. The Vision Report based on this meeting, “Menu Vision: Blending Tradition with Trend” containing CFVG Views, an executive summary of the discussion and and additional resources are available under Meeting Components on this page.
CFVG May 5, 2025 Meeting Transcript
Meeting Facilitator
- Richard Poye, COO, Food Trends Think Tank
CFVG Member Participants:
- Joe Brumfeld, Sr Category Manager – Beverages, La Lomita Inc
- Richard Cashion, COO, Curbys
- Heather Davis, Senior Director of Food Service, The Parker Companies
- Brandon Frampton, Director of Fresh Food, Loop & Poppy (Loop Neighborhood Market)
- Stephanie Gallentine, COO, Lassus Bros. Oil, Inc.
- Barbara Kessler, Senior Director Food & Beverage, Dash In
- Kris Klinger, Vice President Auxiliary Services, Boston Univ
- Jac Moskalik, VP of Food, Innovation and Strategy, Global Partners
- Jasmine Struble, Senior Category Manager, Yesway
- Derek Thurston, Director of Foodservice, Cliffs Local Market
- Bonnie Zaring, Executive Director, Food Programs and Offers, RaceTrac
Presenter
- Claire Conaghan, Trendologist and Associate Director, Datassential
Ally Supporters
- Jon Cox, Vice President Retail Foodservice, McLane
- Sarah Jenks, Senior Director Solutions Consulting, Upshop
Vision Group Network Founders
- Myra Kressner, Founder, Kressner Strategy Group
- Eva Strasburger, President, StrasGlobal
- Roy Strasburger, CEO, StrasGlobal
Meeting:
Richard Poye:
My name is Richard Poye. Welcome to Convenience Foodservice Vision Group. This is our second gathering. I am excited to welcome a number of new people to the group. We’re going to be having a really interesting conversation about menu development using data insights.
A bit of housekeeping 101s for people who haven’t been part of this. It’s really ideal as a participant in the group to have your camera on. When you’re not talking, please make sure your mics are on mute. And it’s always good to raise your hand using the raise hand icon if you have a question or comment. We really view the chat as an opportunity for you to share something like a link to a particular relevant site so the rest of the group can see it, but we don’t want it used as a sidebar conversation that splits the group’s attention.
Also, a tech issue happened to me last week during a meeting that involved my microphone. If you think somebody’s having a tech issue with their camera or mic it’s always good to interrupt and let them know — it might be a quick fix.
We’re going to have a lot of introductions today where people will get a chance to introduce themselves, talk about their roles, and any interesting insight, but first we’ll give Roy, Eva, and Myra an opportunity to talk. So, I’ll hand it off to Roy.
Roy Strasburger:
Thank you, Richard, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the meeting. A couple of other housekeeping issues. This is the publication and antitrust acknowledgement [Publication and Antitrust Statement Shown on Screen] that is a part of the document you signed as a member or when you signed your presenter or guest form. As a reminder, we are recording this meeting, and the transcript of this meeting is going to be included in our digital Vision Report after the meeting. You do have the opportunity to go off the record if you would like. If you can let us know either before you say something you’d like to have off the record or after you say something that you think should be off the record, just let us know and we will accommodate that with the publication, but this is being recorded and the transcript is going to be published digitally.
The other aspect is that many of us compete with each other in the same markets or maybe not in the same markets but certainly on a larger regional scale, and we take the antitrust requirements very seriously. So, please do not discuss anything that is around setting prices, allocating markets, or anything else that could be considered to be anticompetitive. If one of the VGN members thinks that you are saying something that violates this policy, we will let you know. And we will ask you to stop. If you do not stop, you will be excluded from the meetings. So, we do take antitrust very seriously and we appreciate you participating with us on that.
Just to kind of round out, I’ll finish my introductions. I’m one of the co-founders of VGN, and we are really excited about the work that Richard has done for us in helping us pull this group together. A lot of great ideas and conversations around it to help us with our mission to educate the industry and help retailers be better retailers. So, thank you for joining us today.
Eva Strasburger:
I was just going to say welcome to everybody. I’m also a co-founder with Roy and Myra. And again, I really appreciate everyone’s involvement here, which promotes VGN and Vision Group Network’s mission, which is Sharing Today to Shape Tomorrow. So, thank you.
Myra Kressner:
Well, thank you. I am Myra Kressner, the other co-founder of Vision Group Network, and again it’s just a pleasure to be with you today. It’s wonderful to see some new members. This is our second Convenience Foodservice Vision Group meeting, so it’s wonderful to see the new members and just personally see some folks that I’ve known over the years. So, it’s a pleasure to be with you. And lastly, the topic of foodservice is something that you may, from time to time, hear us also refer to some of our other groups where the conversation has overlapped. Our Global Convenience Vision Group and our Conexxus Vision Group and our Convenience Leaders Vision Group have also recently been having a lot of conversation about the opportunities and the challenges and all of the trends that we’re seeing in foodservice. So, it’s just really wonderful to bring that all together with you today as well. So, thank you for that. Richard?
Richard Poye:
What I’m going to do is go through in alphabetical order, so I make sure I capture all the new people in the group. Just do a quick intro and some highlights about yourself. This is a great opportunity to engage not just within this group but outside the group as well. So, Ryan, could you go ahead and give us a little bit of a heads up about yourself?
Ryan Blevins:
Yes. Hello everyone, Ryan Blevins and I work for Weigel’s. Weigel’s is in eastern Tennessee, in Knoxville, Tennessee. We currently have 84 stores. A little bit about myself. I moved here three years ago from Atlanta. Great move. Don’t miss the traffic at all down in Atlanta. I’ve got two children, a graduating daughter, who is graduating in about 12 days. Super proud of that. She’s moving down to South Carolina to attend the University of South Carolina Beaufort. And I just appreciate being a part of this group. Looking forward to getting to know you all a little bit better and just sharing and learning from each other.
Richard Poye:
Fantastic. Thank you, Ryan. Joe, you’re up next.
Joe Brumfield:
Hey everybody, Joe Brumfield. I work for a company called Tex Best Travel Centers and El Tigre Convenience Stores. We are located in South Texas, San Antonio area. We have 35 stores, half of them are large travel centers, the other half are convenience stores. The convenience stores are pretty much in what we call the Valley, Rio Grande Valley, along the river and across the border from Mexico. Our travel centers are primarily in South Central Texas. And I’m actually in the parking lot of one right now that we are building in La Blanca, Texas. This is actually our second one here in South Texas.
I’ve been in the industry for 39 years. I handle all the beverages, packaged beer, and of course dispensed. And an interesting fact, let’s see, Richard, I’m in Texas because of Richard Poye. He actually hired me back in 2013, and I appreciate that every day. And he still talks to me, so I guess we’re good.
Richard Poye:
Yes, we’re good. All right, thank you, Joe. Richard?
Richard Cashion:
Okay. There’s a few Richards, right? So, Richard Cashion with Curby’s Express Market, We’re up in Lubbock, Amarillo, and Midland, Texas area, West Texas. I’ve been with Curby’s almost two years now. Opened our first fuel store and are doing the conversion on that right now. Very food and beverage focused if you see my [camera] background. That’s just a sample of the custom drinks and MTOs (Made to Order) that we do. 32 flavors of tea and bubbler, so very interesting concept into what we’re pushing on the foodservice side. An 18-inch jumbo pie program that we’ve got is exploding in Amarillo right now. We just focus on fresh and trying to reinvent convenience. Both stores have drive-thrus and all stores going forward will too.
Richard Poye:
All right, thank you, Richard. Heather?
Heather Davis:
Heather Davis, I’m the senior director of foodservice for Parker’s Kitchen. We’re based out of Savannah, Georgia. Currently we have 100 stores. Right now we’re opening about 20 new stores a year for the foreseeable future, so kind of joke now that it took us 50 years to get to 100 stores, and we’re going to build another hundred stores in the next four or five years. So, we’re in a very accelerated growth mode right now. Really heavy into our fresh fried chicken tender program and then items that support that. Really strong cold dispensed beverage program. But we’re in the South, so hot coffee is not a sweet spot for us.
Richard Poye:
Okay. All right, thank you, Heather. Stephanie, good to see you.
Stephanie Galentine:
Hi, my name is Stephanie Galentine. I’m with Lassus Brothers Oil. We’re out of Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio. We have 35 c stores and we have 15 proprietary pizza and sub restaurants within those c stores. We’re in a bit of an evolution. We’re about 25 years on our food, so we were some early adopters. But there’s a lot that we can be doing and should be doing, and so I’m really excited to come in and learn more about all of the opportunities and take that food another level up.
Richard Poye:
Great, thank you, Stephanie. Yes, interesting stores. I hadn’t seen them until about six months ago but there’s a lot of good stuff going on there.
Kris.
Kris Klinger:
Hi, Kris Klinger, vice president of auxiliary services at Boston University. My world’s a little bit different than many of yours overseeing all the dining and housing and a bunch of other little services that we provide to our students. We’ve got a handful of convenience stores and a number of retail food concepts as well as residential dining, and a lot of enhanced vending as well that we’re using to supplement the full service or quick service concepts in some of the different spaces. So, it’s really interesting to hear what you all are working on and to see what may work for our students and obviously then they’ll eventually be out there in the real world, vice versa. Before they come here, they’re out there, and then after they leave here, they’ll be out there again, so it’s great to be with you all and learn from you.
Richard Poye:
Kris, thank you. There’s a lot of interesting things going on at college campuses that might be able to parlay into traditional c store formats. Jac?
Jac Moskalik:
Hey there, I’m Jac Moskalik. I’ve been in the industry for 27 years, which feels like forever, and I don’t like to say it out loud. Makes me feel old. Half distribution supply chain, half retail, which is split between convenience, big box, and supermarket. I’m at Global Partners. I’ve been here for a year. The banner we’re probably the most famous for is Alltown Fresh, but they hired me for our new concept, which I can’t speak too much to. But you guys should see it hit the trade pubs in a couple of weeks, and we’re really excited.
Just a little bit about Global, we have 450 corporate-operated stores and 1,000 dealer-operated stores, or lease-operated. And we’re in, I think, 16 different states, and we are looking to expand as well. So, nice to meet everybody.
Richard Poye:
Fantastic. Thanks, Jac. Derek?
Derek Thurston:
Hey everybody, Derek Thurston, director of foodservice for Cliff’s Local Markets. We’re located in upstate New York. We have 22 stores. Very foodservice-focused brand. A little bit about myself, right out of college I spent 10 years with Subway corporate. Used to call on a lot of convenience stores. Finally jumped on board with the Nice N Easy chain, which converted over to the Cliff’s Local Markets. I’ve got a couple kids, one baby on the way, could be coming any minute honestly, so excited about that. And, quick nugget, I went to my first Alltown Fresh this weekend, it was in Schenectady outside of a basketball tournament. Great food, had great service. So, really enjoyed it.
Jac Moskalik:
That’s so cool. Small world. Thanks.
Richard Poye:
And then, Sarah, you’re visiting us today for Upshop. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sarah Jenks:
Thank you, Richard, and thanks for having me, everyone. My name is Sarah Jenks. I’m our senior director of solutions consulting at Upshop. So, Mike Weber asked me to fill in today because really what that means is I’ve helped implement our foodservice software in thousands of stores across the U.S., convenience stores specifically. So, I have no problem putting on a hairnet and gloves and getting dirty in the kitchen. Have lots of fun stories we can swap later on.
And then in terms of where I’m at the world, I’m out of Atlanta, Georgia, so Ryan and Heather, I am somewhere in between you if you were to pinpoint me on a map, so I have visited both your stores. Very fun to visit them both. Actually, Heather, a fun fact is I used to live in Pooler, and I know that you have a store there where chewy ice was all the rage. People spent any amount of money for chewy ice in Pooler. And a fun fact, Derek, you can relate to this. I have a three-month-old baby. I just returned from maternity leave two weeks ago, so go easy on me.
Richard Poye:
Congratulations, that’s great.
Sarah Jenks:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Richards Poye:
And finally, Robert Hampton.
Robert Hampton:
Good afternoon, everyone. Robert Hampton. I’m with the Vision Group Network. Formerly I was chief information officer at Jackson’s Food Stores out here in Meridian, Idaho. Did that for about nine years and have had two stints in the industry. Previously I was with Texaco way, way back in the 90s. So, I heard Richard talk about stores in Lubbock and Amarillo. I was just there a couple weeks ago, saw the stores, and I’ll be back there in a couple weeks, so looking forward to seeing that.
I was previously one of the founding members of the Convenience Technology Vision Group. And been part of Conexxus and NACS and hosted panels at both, so looking forward to learning and seeing what you guys are doing. Thank you.
Roy Strasburger:
Richard, I’m just going to really quickly add that the three blank screens that did not get introduced are members of our VGN production crew. So, they’re the ones who help us put together the Vision Reports, so just to let you guys know who they are. So, thank you.
Richard Poye:
Fantastic. So, it looks like we’re ready now to get into the presentation portion of the conversation today. Claire’s going to be showing a lot of data today. If you need to ask a question, Claire is open to that – that’s her presentation style. If you do have a question we request using the raise hand icon. Ideally though we want more of the conversation towards the end.
Claire is a trendologist from Datassential. She’s also a big-time foodie. I think a lot of times you have the data nerd and the foodie on opposite planets. In this case the Venn diagram has overlapped very well. So we have somebody’s who is passionate about food, menus, understands it, and can speak to both the food and the data side of the question. I think that’s one of the things that makes it exciting about Claire’s presentation today. So, I will let Claire begin to share a little bit about herself, and then we can dive into the conversation.
Claire Conaghan:
[Slide #1 – C-Store Menuing] Sure, thank you. That was such a good intro, I don’t know that I have much else to say. So, this is a little review of where we’re headed. They’re not the most firm sections, but we’re going to talk about how to approach menuing, some key categories, some generational and regional differences, which I know is important for convenience stores, lots of generation targets and lots of regional skews…you all already mentioned all the different regions that you focus on. And then we’ll talk about some trending offerings.
[Slide #2 – Claire Conaghan] So, you all nicely introduced yourselves, so I owe you the same. I’m Claire Conaghan, as Richard noted I’m a trendologist and associate director on the publication teams at Datassential, and I’ve been doing this for, gosh, almost 15 years, which given how long Datassential’s been a company, 15 years is a pretty significant chunk of the Datassential timeframe. And the art and science are my favorite part of the data. This has my whole spiel, but my happy place is our tools. But I am a foodie at heart. What I do when I’m not playing with numbers for my day job is I like to have a veggie garden, where I like to grow veggies that are hard to get at the grocery store for my two kids, who are four and eight, and I call them my budding foodies. We went to Ethiopian food and dim sum this weekend. Ethiopian was a bigger hit than dim sum for the record, which I did not see coming. But I guess if you eat something with your hands and chunks of bread, it turns out kids love it. So, that’s a little about me.
And we’ll just get into the numbers. I don’t mind being interrupted. I think we said we should do about 20 minutes. When I timed it out I was going over, so I’ll try to take my time and really go through the numbers, but if I’m losing you, feel free to interrupt. I have a couple places where I’m going to check in with you all and make sure that we’re going on the journey together. So, we’ll just go for it.
Pricing [Slide #3 – % of People] First thing’s first to set the stage. We’re talking about price, which is perhaps the most boring part of menuing to me as a foodie. The pricing is critical but not necessarily the most exciting. So, this is a chart that shows the percentage of people who always consider pricing when it is available on menus. And it’s the majority of people. But what’s key here is I think is less that people check price, of course they check price on menus, but more that there’s not a big difference between the generations.
I think there’s sometimes this impression that the younger consumer doesn’t necessarily care at all about price points because they’re still in their parents’ house or this, that, and the other thing. Gen Z is, in fact, growing up and pricing is important to them. And it’s no longer more important necessarily to Boomers. It’s all kind of across the board, no statistical differences. It’s that classic table stakes. Once I’ve decided I’m going to the convenience store, and that’s where I’m purchasing my food, I have my expectation. And you all know your strategies around that, so we don’t need to get into it, but that’s kind of price is of course important.
Data Analysis [Slide #4 – 19%, 47%, 33%] But where we get to play around and do a little bit more fun is that innovation side, the menu development, so that’s where we’ll be focusing primarily today. So, this is a stat from our menu development keynote. And the key part here is that 19% of consumers prefer creative and trendy menus. Which is important, right? 20% of people are looking for that. But we also want to keep in mind that 47% are looking for that traditional menu. So, it’s kind of always that tug. We don’t want to lose that 20% looking for something new and exciting, and so we all work to have something innovative.
The other key for this, and that we never put on charts because that middle number is not as exciting or enticing, but 33% of people are actually neutral or they kind of agree with both. And you don’t want to lose them either, that middle chunk of people tends to be a key part of anyone’s business. So, there’s 33% who kind of is probably into creative and trendy menus a little bit too.
[Slide #5 – 19%, 12%, 27%] But there are generational skews when we look at that. This is again something that I feel like we know in our hearts, but you don’t always have the numbers to support it. So, 19% of consumers prefer creative and trendy menus. Slightly less so statistically from Boomers, only 12%. But that’s still 12%. That’s a good chunk of people who are interested in those trendy menus of the Boomer demographic. And then we do have our Gen Z consumers, who are those looking for those creative and trendy menus. And that’s something to think about and focus on here.
I think it is worth noting, it’s not on the slide but it is a report that I’ve made, we’ve actually done some work on how generational interest has shifted over time, and we are seeing specifically that I think there was a timeframe in which people thought Boomers were not adventurous foodies. But we are seeing an increased awareness across all demographic groups in all those early-stage trends. For a while it was you have to stick to the traditional if your demographic is Gen X to some degree or Boomer. But we are actually seeing that especially Boomers are catching up. All of the social media, all of the food TV, all of that has meant that we are all actually on a much more even playing field when it comes to those food trends.
And then we’re also seeing, I think there was a little bit where we thought Gen Z might not be quite as trendy as the Millennial, and as it turns out it’s just a young people thing for the most part. The young consumer does just have general interest in and kind of drives those food trends.
What I do think is key here, and what we’ve seen about Gen Z specifically, is that there’s actually a lot of overlap in what Boomers most like and what Gen Z thinks is trendy. Because there’s all these old is new foods, which Gen Z was not exposed to, so think your tiramisu, your French dip, all those kinds of classic dishes which Boomers see as traditional, Gen Z thinks they’re creative and trendy menus. So, we’re seeing that they’re gaining awareness in a bunch of what we call ubiquitous food items. So, there’s a little bit of a sweet spot where you can appeal to that Boomer that wants the more traditional dish while appealing to the Gen Z who wants creative and trendy, and it’s actually the same menu items. So, that’s something that we can kind of keep an eye out on.
[Slide #6 – Type of New] When we think about how to introduce these new menu items, we have this: do we want something that’s an entirely new dish? Mostly people don’t want that. Less than 20% of people want that. A dish that is mostly new to me but has something familiar, that’s 44%. And then 30% want a dish that is familiar but has a little something different. And then the Boomers really want that classic traditional food, but it’s still just 15%. And I think the key here is that Gen Z is even more likely to want that mostly new to me but has something familiar. We’re always looking for, and I’m sure this is something you all work for in your innovation, that sweet spot, which we call at Datassential the safe experimentation zone, where it appears mostly familiar but it has a little tweak that makes it just exciting enough to offer that uniqueness.
[Slide #7 – Smoked Brisket Egg Rolls] So, I did find us a menu example that kind of speaks to that. So we’ve got the smoked brisket egg rolls, which is one of my favorite menu examples to work with right now. This is from our Launches and Ratings platform, and that’s where we take new items, limited time offers and returning items from both restaurants and convenience stores, and we test them with consumers. And then we can benchmark them to the tens of thousands of items we’ve done this with since 2016.
The one I really like is the Famous Dave’s smoked brisket egg rolls, and I like this one because it’s mostly pretty classic stuff in it. Egg rolls are not really an “out there” prep. Beef brisket is maybe something a little odd for an egg roll, but certainly not for Famous Dave’s. But then it’s got this Korean sweet heat sauce, which makes it a little bit outside of Famous Dave’s wheelhouse and makes it a little bit more unique, which lets us get that 56% of people saying it’s extremely or very new and different. And that gives us a five out of five rating for uniqueness.
So, ultimately, I wouldn’t personally say this is the most out there idea, but it really does get high uniqueness. And then it has high draw. People would go there just for this item. And it has a high purchase intent. And then we have this composite score, which is 0 to 100, and this one gets the superstar status at 80. So, this is a really good example of something that balances that purchase intent and uniqueness without going too far into seeming unusual.
[Slide #8 – Concept Ideation/Smoked Brisket Egg Rolls] And then I did throw this in, this is where the numbers geek comes out. This is another situation, another platform we have at Datassential called Concept Ideation. And I can type in all of the words and it pulls from our different tools. But what the takeaway here is that you can see that the combination, one, offers strong appeal, but it’s not actually that rare of a concept in general. And I feel like that’s sort of interesting when we saw how it did. They pair okay, they’re not the rarest ingredients, but somehow that slight addition of the Korean barbecue sauce bumped it up to that high uniqueness.
And we can sort of see how that might happen when we look at the listing here. So, we have Korean. Since I updated this, it’s this close to ubiquity, but it was in the proliferation stage of the trends, so it’s pretty well established but it’s not necessarily everywhere yet. It’s still got good menu growth by it. It still has lower affinities, so 39% is far lower than the other ingredients in this dish. And then it does have those skews to Asian, Hispanic, and Gen Z. So, it’s getting you some of those specific generations. And this is just a good example of how you might do one of those safe experimentation concepts.
I’m going to pause here. Before we move into talking a little bit about dayparts, does anyone have any questions on anything I’ve covered so far?
[Slide #9 – Last Visit: Daypart] Okay. All right, we’re going to pop into a little bit on dayparts, and thinking about innovation from a daypart standpoint. I feel like you all probably have your theories and knowledge of where it makes the most sense to innovate, but this gives us a little more support on that and we can think a little bit strategically with regard to item types that relate to the dayparts.
Customer Behavior With our last visit, daypart, this is specific to convenience stores, so this is from our convenience store keynote published, you can see that generally your dayparts are pretty much evenly split, right? We’ve got breakfast, mid-morning snack, that’s 30% or so, 31% specifically, and then we’ve got lunch at 30% and afternoon snack at 30%. Generally speaking, for our businesses, dinner and late-night snack, not exactly the biggest bulk of the business, so those have far lower percentages.
[Slide # 10 – Likelihood to Try] Then, we can also think through how people are willing to try for those dayparts. We know which makes up the bulk of the business, right? But where are people really interested in innovation, generally speaking?
These are the likelihood to try new menu item by daypart. This is across all segments, not just convenience stores, this is just generally across when dining out. You can see that breakfast is not there. I feel like me, personally, I will try anything new and different for a snack, but I don’t feel like this is how apparently all consumers necessarily feel, because the likelihood to try is far lower for the snack experience, which I think is more of a format issue.
I feel like if you like the format you might try a different flavor but a little less so from the format perspective. We do see lower trial for trying something new at breakfast.
As the day continues, people are more interested in trying something new. The area where you’re probably going to have the best luck is going to be that lunch daypart. That’s the takeaways. If you’re thinking of doing something truly innovative, I would lean towards lunch, and then there’s a little more support in a bit as to which parts of lunch might be the best options.
[Slide #11 – Last Visit: Prepared Foods Purchase] Okay. Looking at prepared food purchases, this is what, according to survey respondents, was their last prepared food visit. It’s not necessarily obviously the sales that you all have. This is when we surveyed consumers in this report. We asked what was your last prepared food purchase from convenience stores.
The top one was pizza, and then it was cold sandwiches and wraps, skewing a little bit to Gen Z more than anything else. Statistically, breakfast sandwiches skew a little bit more to Boomers, and then the fresh bakery breakfast items to Gen Z.
This is the chart that I was talking about that really focuses on. We don’t need to be innovative probably for the most part for breakfast, right? We’ve established that Boomers are a little less interested in those innovative things and people are less willing to have innovative breakfast. Breakfast sandwiches, given that they skew to the Boomer consumer, probably not the place for tons of innovation.
When you look at that launches and ratings platform, you see that. There’s not usually a lot of interesting or exciting stuff happening in breakfast. Just switching a carrier is wild enough, adding a sauce is plenty. You don’t need to get too wild there. We’re going to go into pizza. This is going to be a journey. We’re pulling in a bunch of data from different places, so try to stick with me while we do this. It’ll I think come together in the end. We’ll find out.
Data Analysis [Slide #12 – Pizza -Regional] What happened here, what we’re pulling from here, is these are terms that can be found on pizza, but these indexes aren’t necessarily that they’re found on pizza in that region. What do I mean by that? If we’re looking, for example, at the Midwest, dill pickle as a menu item call out is on two times as many menus in the Midwest than in the total US.
It’s not necessarily dill pickle pizza. It’s just the concept of dill pickle. These are all things that are found on pizzas at some level. They could inspire pizza innovation, if that makes sense with everybody.
That said, I am going to take the dill pickles and put them on pizza because social media wants to and innovation has done so, so we can look at that.
[Slide #13 – Dill Pickle and Nashville Pizza] We have two examples here. We’ve got Wawa doing the dill pickle ranch pizza. This one I would say did moderately right? 32 is lower on the zero to 100 scale, but it has super high uniqueness, and depending on the strategy, that might be fine. Depending on what you wanted to do, if you just wanted to kind of have a couple of them, it didn’t really require too much waste, this might be a fine strategy, and ultimately it has the same consider level as this other pizza, right?
But what these two examples let us do is we can see how important that full build is. Looking at dill pickle, if you don’t like dill pickles, you are not touching this Wawa pizza. There’s nothing else to bring you in. It’s just not going to happen.
But the Nashville hot crispy chicken pizza from Old Chicago has so much going on that maybe that kind of deterred some people. It has lower purchase intent, but there is, to some degree, something for everyone. It has the full build that might temper some of the heat, right?
So, we have Nashville hot chicken, but now we’ve got tang from pickles, we have cooling ranch, and then sweet and hot from the hot honey. Maybe it’s too much going, which resulted in that lower purchase intent, but it’s still got four out of five stars on everything else.
By bringing in all of those elements and appealing to the classic regional dish of Nashville hot that became a national dish, that one has a little bit of broader appeal. That’s one way to look at it. We can look at one specific ingredient from a region and try to think of an overall build that works, or can look at it, of course, the other classic way, which is what’s top growing on pizza menus?
Data Analysis [Slide #14 – What’s Trending] And that’s what Datessential is arguably most known for is our menu trends database. What we do there it’s really simple, it’s just restaurants and it’s what’s going on menus, presumably is selling fairly well. What’s coming off menus is presumably not selling well. Therefore, the top growing things are the trending items, right?
This is top trending, pizza-specific dishes, and these are the things that are currently growing. They’re sorted by four-year growth, fastest growing. It shows the current penetration and then where we think the growth will go, or the penetration will be in 2029.
It gets a little mixed up for wildly huge growth like plant-based, but there’s a lot of things we’ve already seen here. We’ve seen hot honey, we know that the pepperoni cups are growing, any iteration of that. There’s hints of health with cauliflower pizza crust, keto, and bowls.
Then, we also have the long one. If you looked at long and you were like, “What on earth is that?” Those are long peppers because that made me curious as well. Is there a question?
Roy Strasburger:
Yeah, Claire, what does penetration mean according to this chart?
Claire Conaghan:
A very good question. Penetration being percent of restaurants that offer, so that’s the percent of restaurants that offer. So, in this particular case, we’ll be going into Indian. 2% of restaurants that offer pizza now offer one that is specified as Indian on the menu.
[Slide #15 – Chicken Tikka] Okay. We’ll take a look at Indian pizza. This one I think is interesting because it feels like a pretty far out trend but has been trending for a little bit now, I don’t know, maybe I’d say three to five years. It seems like something that’s much further out, and yet Twin Peaks has already done it as of August. It honestly did fairly well. I would say a 51 specialty appeal is pretty good for something that’s this trend-forward. But this one, they didn’t take it too far, right? We saw on the prior chart the paneer, a type of Indian cheese, is growing. They didn’t go so far as to put anything all that different.
The part that makes it Indian is that they called it chicken tikka and that they use tikka sauce, right? They didn’t do the whole build in an Indian way. They just did a little bit with the sauce, which I think keeps it in that safe experimentation zone. It gave them three out of five stars, which for more trend-forward option is pretty good, and four out of five for uniqueness. You can tell that they didn’t get so unique that they were alienating people.
The other key part in our data is in launches and ratings we can see that branded purchase intent versus unbranded. If you have come up with a concept and it has lower purchase intent, when you ask about interest in purchasing from your brand, that’s always a bad sign.
In this case, the Twin Peaks consumer understood the concept, so we went from 45% of consumers who would definitely or probably buy this item up to 57% of Twin Peaks consumers, which is a good sign for their brand. That’s the pizza journey, but we’re going to [go from] feeling a little out there with the Indian pizza into some sandwiches. If anyone has any pizza questions before we move on? No?
[Slide #16 – GenZ -Sandwiches] Okay, we’re going to go into sandwiches, because that is an important part, as we’ve already seen and as you all know, for the c-store business. I did look at Gen Z since the cold sandwiches for last visit skewed towards Gen Z, and wanted to see what they would like in particular.
[Slide #17 – Concept Ideation – Eggplant..] There’s obviously quite a lot you could work with here. We’re going to go through the very, very trendy side. I’m not necessarily saying that any of you are moments from offering a sabich sandwich on your menu, but actually it sounds like some of you might be based on some of the more innovative restaurants I heard about.
The key here is that we can, same idea with concept ideation. If you find that core part of the sandwich and just make it more approachable and bury the weird word, the people who are excited for the weird word, Gen Z, who want their sabich Israeli street food sandwich as kind of noted at the bottom here, if we call it our eggplant parmesan pita sandwich, its core stays the same, but we might have broader appeal.
You can see that eggplant and Parmesan skew to boomers, so it might just have a broader appeal if we focus in on different parts of the build. I know that descriptions work different at convenience stores. People aren’t necessarily reading the menus in the same way, but thinking about the build like that can help.
All of these elements, it seems weird, right? But all of them are actually pretty common components at this point outside of the tahini. If you just think of it as a Mediterranean sandwich, it’s not quite as far out there.
I’m going to pop back for a moment. These first five or six sandwiches are pretty early stage for the most part. You’re maybe not necessarily doing that, though. Convenience stores do [inaudible] excellently in Japan, but you can also just get the buffalo chicken, right?
[Slide #18 – Buffalo Chichen Ranch] We saw that it skews to Gen Z. That’s a simple sandwich if you’re trying to appeal to that particular demographic. We don’t have to go super far into the most trend-forward. We can just pick something that they tend to like a little bit more and lean into that.
This is a particular item from QuickChek, the buffalo chicken ranch crunch. That was part of a limited time offer that they did for the New York Giants. You can see when we tested in the tool that it does skew a little bit to Gen Z, and even more so to millennials, less so to Boomers. Then, it did have a good skew to the west and, somewhat ironically, less so to the Northeast, despite it being a New York Giants sandwich.
[Slide #19 – GenZ Bakery] Same idea here, we’re doing another trending menu item. We’re Looking at Gen Z for the bakery breakfast. You could do any number of these fried donut global influence things at the top here. Any of them would have high appeal with Gen Z, or we can look further down at something that has social media appeal and might make the most sense for a business.
[Slide #20 – 33%] Something like a flat croissant, right? Flat croissant being viral. I don’t know. It feels like it keeps coming back, but maybe viral more about a year or so ago. This one makes sense for the convenience store, one, because they last well on shelf, two, they’re less crumbly, you have already squished the croissant so it’s not crumbling in the same way, which makes it better for the grab-and-go moment, and there’s a lot you can do flavor-wise that could make sense pairing for any beverage lines.
This is one that skews a little bit to Gen Z, but it’s just a croissant that’s been flattened, so it has more familiarity to a broader range of consumers, and then it does have high interest. We have tested this. It says 33% of consumers are interested, which gave it a 67 out of 100 of the varying social media items we’ve tested over the past year or two. That is what I’ve got for the food side.
[Slide #21 – Last Visit: Prepared Beverage] We’re going to do one last little journey. Now we’re going to move into beverages, unless there’s any food questions.
Beverages Customer Behavior Okay, last section. We’re going to do beverages. Same idea here. We did last visit, prepared beverage purchase. Of course it’s fountain soft drinks. These are just the prepared ones. This does not include anything from a cooler case or anything. We just asked about things from the prepared area. The fountain soft drinks were of course the most commonly purchased for last purchase. Hot coffee skews to Boomers, slushies skews to Gen Z, hot espresso drinks and iced coffee. Obviously this one sort of has even more skew than the prior one, which is that not everyone offers all of these things necessarily.
Some of the purchasing is related to availability, but there is that skew for Gen Z to be interested in iced coffee and for hot coffee to go to Boomers. I don’t have the data here, but a sort of interesting thing is that even though Gen Z clearly skews to iced coffee, when they do participate in hot coffee, they are more interested in those flavored coffees, which is something that I feel like convenience stores does very well that no other segment in foodservice does particularly well. That’s another thing to keep in mind. It looks like there’s one question from Jasmine.
Jasmine Struble:
I have a quick question. On the iced coffee category, do you feel like it’s possibly underrepresented because in a traditional c-store, self-serve counter, most retailers are using one cup, so it’s set up in the system as a cold dispensed beverage for ringing? We’re not really able to indicate whether or not they’re putting a fountain or really any cold beverage in there if they don’t have a dedicated clear cup for slushies or for iced coffee.
Claire Conaghan:
I don’t think that would play into here, just because this is consumers saying what they did, not necessarily what was actually rung up. I’m an iced coffee drinker when I’m on a road trip. I’m a hot coffee drinker in general, but I like iced coffee for road trips.
You do find that there are many c stores who don’t have it or the machines have some challenges. They’re quirky, as you all know, but it shouldn’t play for this particular point as far as how it’s rung up or how the cup works.
Data Analysis [Slide #22 – Regional Category] The same thing here that I did for pizza, these are terms that could be paired with coffee, but the regional skews are not necessarily completely grounded in coffee.
What do I mean by that? The west has lavender as a skew. That’s something that is in fact paired in coffee, but this lavender being 1.8 times more likely in the west than other regions, at that 180 there on the far left. That isn’t necessarily only coffee, right? That could be a pastry that’s showing up, that could be a tea, but it is a term that is paired with coffee.
Most of these terms are coffee-driven, so you could take your inspiration in this way. You could also have the data shift and you not catch it. We switched American as a call-out to American cheese. Don’t worry about that in the south. These terms are things that skew to different regions, some do work better and are coffee specific. In the west, cafe de olla is one that we have our eye on for having a really big summer. That’s a coffee-specific term.
[Slide #23 – Unique Beverage] These are what people want from convenience stores. There was a longer list, but we focused on the ones that are easier to execute and more realistic to execute on.
We have cold pressed juices and juice bar at the top. That is of course something that could also work in the cooler case, grab-and-go. Cold brew coffee is something that can also be done in the cooler case, though, based on other data we have, despite there being plenty of good bottled cold brew options, people do have a preference for the actual cold brew from either a machine or poured by a barista, so that they’re not necessarily looking for the cold brew in the cooler case.
If it’s unavailable, they might just switch gears and get something else, or plan to not come back is what the data shows. Then, we have bubble tea, aqua fresca. This one being further out, but I could see a market where it makes sense, the kombucha on tap.
[Slide #24 – AFH Cold] As far as away from home cold brew consumption by venue, I thought this was sort of an interesting stat. This is from a very specific beverage set of tools that we have called Buzz.
What you can see here is that of course the top cold brew consumption venue are coffee shops at 75%. That was one of where they bought their cold brew from. Quick service is also up there, but the convenience store shift since 2019 has been massive.
When we asked this question in 2019, it was 15% of consumers said they were purchasing from a convenience store, and now it’s up to 32%. Lots of that is an expansion in what’s available from an equipment standpoint, but I think that’s sort of interesting because you do have that chance to get close to QSR.
I think that can be important when we pair it with the next section. Also, it’s important because lots of other segments like restaurants are not dabbling much in the cold brew trend and fast casual is way behind on that, and casual and mid-scale are mostly not playing in the space hardly at all yet. It’s definitely something that could be done pretty well, especially given how well cold brew works in a concentrate. It is something that we saw that iced coffee skews to Gen Z. We know that cold brew also does. It could really help with this.
Customer Behavior [Slide #25 – Visitation Freq] This is our visitation frequency from convenience stores specifically. We know that the daily consumer skews to be Gen Z or Millennial, and of course the way to succeed in most businesses is to either get new customers or convert your regular customers into even more regular customers.
If we can get those once per week Gen Z’s and Millennials, or those several times per week to come back once or twice more, which something like cold brew could help do that, that would obviously mean quite a lot from a dollar perspective.
Strategy [Slide #26 – To Summarize] That’s everything. Then, I have this important chart to summarize, because we went all over the place there to kind of all of the things Claire thought were interesting about convenience stores in the data when it comes to menuing.
The first thing is that pricing is important, but equally important across demos, it’s more table stakes than necessarily a differentiator. The second being one in five consumers seeks out creative offerings. Focusing on your core menu parts to find that balance of uniqueness, that safe experimentation can help appease and attract those adventurous customers.
Our morning, lunch, and afternoon snack are about equally important, but people are more excited to be adventurous the later the day goes on. That’s something that you should consider when you are doing your innovation is considering that interest and more innovative as the day goes on.
The fourth being considering our regional or demographic skews of course makes sense. We don’t really have to get super out there to fit with these preferences. We don’t have to do the most recent thing or the most Gen Z thing ever. We can get something a little bit further down and appeal to a broader range.
Then, lastly, my cold brew agenda, which is that cold brew is a low-hanging option for gaining more regular Gen Z visits, but it isn’t the only option. Of course, just consider your core customer as well. You might not want to put everything in one concept, but there are kinds of synergies that you can find, like that cold brew option. That’s everything.
Richard Poye:
Well, thank you very much, Claire. I like the way that the deck is broken out into different chunks that we can talk about and think about.
I’m going to pivot to Jac real quick because she has another commitment really soon and I want to make sure she has an opportunity to get into the conversation. We’ll do that and then we can proceed with general discussion and get everyone’s input and any questions.
Jac Moskalik:
Thanks, Richard. Just my thoughts. Awesome presentation. It made me feel better about where we’re going. I’m totally aligned with the one out of five.
The way we approach food here at Global is we use customer segmentation, so we have our daily ritualist who’s our core business, but we have to be speaking to what we call a seeker. That’s the innovation and the fun stuff that comes with our categories.
Then, you’re right on regarding the dinner daypart. I think there’s only one chain that I can honestly say does dinner well, and it’s because of their strategy, which is Casey’s. I think they’re phenomenal. They also do pizza delivery, which is world domination in my book for convenience.
Regional is a huge play for us as well. One of our biggest focuses, especially with our new format, is going to be local. We’re going to be incorporating local ingredients into our menu and all that good stuff.
Then, there are ethnic pockets that we have to address. What’s really cool is a lot of those ethnic items are seen as what’s trending in the seeker, which is the one out of five. They’re willing to try something new.
Then, oh my gosh, I just got approval for the last round of stores for cold brew. We have cold brew in all of our stores, except I think we have 88 left. We’ll be putting it in this year, but it’s a whole different consumer. It’s that one out of five. They spend a lot more in our store, which was what I was able to use to sell the investment to our executives is look what else they buy in the store, which was a home run for us.
I really liked your presentation. I can’t wait to share some of those insights with our friends and my leadership team, so I appreciate it.
Richard Poye:
Thank you very much, Jac. I’ll kick things off. When I first looked at the presentation a week and a half ago and I saw some of the menu items, I thought, “This is too crazy, this is too extreme.”
But as you begin to drill down into it and think about the menu and the builds, and maybe sometimes it’s a small ingredient or making a flavor a little bit safer, like the Korean sweet heat, that’s a way of speaking to somebody who might be more timid in their flavor preference. They’re like, “Oh, it’s a sweet heat. I feel safe with that.”
And I think maybe this says that one weird thing in a dish is allowed. If you have a core base, like a pizza or the spring roll that you talked about, those types of things, customers understand that one thing, and therefore you’re given permission to add that kind of unique ingredient, whether it’s pickles or whatever it might be. You’re able to bring that into it.
That’s what I took out of the deck is that you’re being more thoughtful about the builds and that you’re bringing more people in with things that they know and then you’re able to add that one unique thing. That actually helps you expand and broaden the group you’re delivering to by being inclusive of the Gen Z and the Boomer, because sometimes they’re viewing the same thing but through a different lens.
All right, who’s up next? Eva?
Eva Strasburger:
I have a question about the Gen Z. Talking to some operators they were saying that they found that they followed influencers initially and had their pulse on the Gen Z, but they found that by the time they had accommodated them or added them to the menu, they had moved on to something else, that they very quickly find a new item. So, there’s very much an awareness about seeing what they like and then adding it. What’s your research finding about that?
Claire Conaghan:
I think that is unfortunately true because trends do move so quickly. That is kind of what we do and why those super early-stage things. Sometimes it feels like those social media trends come out of nowhere, but they’ll often be glimmers in our data.
A good example is we did see two or three years ago kanafeh and pistachio both starting to trend, and then Dubai chocolate happened. I think if you catch something early enough and it makes sense, you might be able to still play in the trend a little bit.
I think that is mostly true, that if you can’t catch that big viral moment, it just may not be worth it, unless you can kind of find its essence and switch to it. So people were putting pickles in their Coca-Cola, whatever. What they want is a touch of tangy in a drink. If you do something completely different, it might work, but you can’t do the exact trend. It’s too late.
Roy Strasburger:
All right. Thank you, Claire. Great presentation. A lot of really good information on that, so thank you very much.
Kind of building upon Eva’s question, the concept of the safe experimenting place I think makes a lot of sense. Because trends move so fast, do you have any kind of specific guidelines for how long you should have a new menu item on the board to determine whether or not it’s successful? If it doesn’t take off all of a sudden, when do you realize that it doesn’t work? When should you move on to the next craze?
Claire Conaghan:
We do have some stats. It’s kind of annoying from an innovation standpoint, right? You work super hard on something and then you can really only let it live out in the world…We found that it used to be that it would live out in the world for two or three months to be evaluated. Now people will give up on it within a month. It’s kind of clear people only expect those limited time offers or those kind of test market items to be out there a short period of time. You can usually know if it’s doing what you hope it will do. That’s at least what our data says consumers expect for how long it will be out there. How long it takes you to decide if it’s worth it in your strategy I guess is something that differs.
Richard Poye:
Derek, do you have a comment?
Derek Thurston:
Yes. That was a great presentation. I can’t get candied croissants out of my mind honestly right now. I keep thinking about them, but the insight on cold brew. I know you mentioned like 40%.
Beverages I just wonder is there any more additional insight on flavored cold brew, like mix-ins, anything like that? I know we started out with cold brew years ago and I had the nitro cold brew. And I was so excited about it and it went nowhere. I don’t think our customer base was ready for it to even understand what it was, so we went to a salted caramel and that seems to do better. But I guess I’m just looking for any additional insight on flavors or equipment that customers prefer to use or anything along those lines with cold brew, because I do think that’s a real opportunity within our stores.
Claire Conaghan:
You know we do have all of that. I am less familiar with it directly top of mind, but we do have the add- ins that they like and the flavors that they do prefer. The nitro is a funny one because it’s just so coffee. I happen to love Nitro, but it’s not for everyone. I can check while you all are talking and try to listen in to see if I can find the exact numbers of what’s the most growing flavors, but we do have it. I just don’t know it top of mind necessarily. Pretty much anything that’s trending in coffee, people will like in cold brew, like you said with the salted caramel or caramel, but I can double check our data to see what’s had the most growth recently.
Jon Cox:
Strategy Yes, I was going to say too, Derek, it is interesting because in a past life before I came to McLane, I ran retail stores and one of the mistakes we made was we rolled out bean to cup in every store and we’re like, man, we’re going to sell iced coffee, we’re going to do all this stuff. It’s going to be great. And it just didn’t work, and it didn’t work because we didn’t have the flavor cream. It doesn’t matter what syrup you use. But what we found through a bunch of trial and error was if you just put…we had the machine where you could do one head nitro and one head iced coffee or cold brew…the syrups out there and let customers make it themselves and even though it was going in the same cup that they’re coming in, they’re putting it in the 44 ounce fountain. It’s just the way it happened, but we saw more adoption that way of just saying, “Hey, come in and make it yourself iced coffee, cold brew the way you want it.” And the mistake we made was actually spending all the money to do bean to cup and not putting those things out with it.
Claire, I appreciated the presentation as well. Paul Clarke (VP, key accounts Datassential) and I go way back, so I think he asked you to speak with us. Paul and I have used Datassential in several different companies, but I think the key for the group is that while you can get in and out of the trends, it has to kind of go past trend in places that we all consider trendy.
One of the things we used to look at was if it is it now mainstream in New York, Chicago, LA, then it’s now trendy for me in the Midwest. So, it takes a long time to get from some of those cities where it was trendy to be something that we would want to try to get in and out of. And to limit my exposure we did unique carriers and unique sauces, so I tried not to change the proteins. And the perfect example was the QuickChek one where you had the Portuguese roll in the descriptor and in that area that means something, to us in South Texas that means nothing. We have no idea what that is.
So I think it’s just understanding what to call things in your market, understanding what’s there, experimenting through sauces and different carriers versus going to a protein purveyor and saying, “Hey, could you make me 10,000 cases of spicy Korean chicken?” That’s going to be really hard if it bombs to get through, but if you go to the sauce manufacturer and say, can you make me a sweet heat Korean sauce that you’re going to top the chicken with, it’s a little easier to get in and out of the sauce than it is to get out of the protein. So just for the group, just some things that we had done with the Datassential data to be able to say, “Hey, here’s how we can play in this and here’s how we can minimize our risk.”
Richard Poye:
Thank you. And Ryan, you’re next.
Ryan Blevins:
Sure. This question is for Claire also. Are you guys able to draw a correlation between the scores that you sort of attached to the product if you’re building out an LTO? If I were building out that brisket egg roll and it scored 80, is there a direct correlation with performance and are you able to track that?
Claire Conaghan:
Well, we have done that on a client to client basis, but we don’t have any tool where we can do that because we don’t have sales, but we have had clients say, “Hey, this one was a success for us,” and then do correlations on the backend, but we don’t have it as a public facing tool. They generally [correlate], that is true, they’ve told us, but I don’t have the numbers and how much they correlate because it’s proprietary to the clients.
Ryan Blevins:
Sure. Okay. Thank you.
Richard Poye:
Thank you, Bonnie?
Bonnie Zaring:
Yes, this one’s for Claire as well, but Claire, great insights. Thank you for all that you’ve provided. When we talk about risk and the balance between unique, trendy, exciting, there’s certainly the part on when you zone in on who might like it, who are you isolating as well? I saw that you really popped out really the Gen Z, how much they like, but how do you research who you might be isolating or who you are offending if you really go after something trendy, there might be another demographic that really is opposing to something, maybe a trend or a flavor. Is there a way to look at it, the opposite too?
Claire Conaghan:
Generally speaking, for someone who might not buy it, they’re just not going to come in at all. It just might not be an item that appeals to them. We do have ‘hate it’ scores, so I’m not going to tell you to make a build with anything. I love licorice and I love anchovies. Don’t build anything out of them, and we have that by all the generations, so looking at maybe less so hate it but dislike it or even neutral to it, you’re not usually trying to make an item where people are completely neutral to it. So those are some stats that we’ll look at if we’re trying to help kind of figure out what we shouldn’t do.
We don’t do that as often, but we have that. And then I personally, that’s one of my favorite things of now not working client side is I can look at the least growing foods on menus or most declining and think about how we can turn them around because that can be kind of interesting or finding the things that are winning in the most declining or sometimes hidden little nuggets of how we can turn something around.
Richard Poye:
Okay, and Sarah?
Sarah Jenks:
Thank you. Yeah, so Claire, in a similar vein, I’m curious, are there any trends you are tired of seeing that you can see are going down? And I’d be especially interested in pizza trends because everyone loves pizza. It’s very profitable, so it’s a lot of fun to experiment with and a lot of times you can do so in a way where you’re not jeopardizing profit, so would love to also know that answer for pizza specifically if you have any insights there?
Claire Conaghan:
There’s what I’m sick of, but there’s not a lot of consumers are sick of. I’ll be honest. I keep thinking hot honey, like haven’t we reached peak hot honey? Haven’t we hit that? No. The predictions show that there is so much more that hot honey can do. One of the ones that I’m very not over and I highlighted in one of our webinars, I’m one of those horrible people that likes pineapple on their pizza. It’s just who I am. But it’s actually growing on menus, which was a very exciting moment for me, but it tends to be paired with fancy cured meat, so they’re trendy restaurants are doing prosciutto and stuff, but from a convenience store. I don’t think I’m too far from a hot honey pepperoni pineapple pizza situation, but I can’t think of anything that I’m super sick of. Pizza is having just a foodservice [moment].
I guess it’s maybe the competition standpoint, it had an incredible year of menus. I do a state of the menu report and it was the top growing by new items per menu, so if you offer pizza, you are continuing to offer new varieties, which means it continues to be something people love and I think it was growing by penetration too, so restaurants are really leading into it, which I guess is a concern if I’m a convenience store, but I don’t think there’s anything that’s going away anytime soon. I’m like seeing what the most declining are.
Jon Cox:
It’s funny because buffalo won’t die either. Every time you think it’s going to be gone and buffalo, it just won’t go away.
Claire Conaghan:
You know some things are classic. It looks like the Mortadella moment is over, but there’s nothing majorly falling off pizza menus that I can see.
Richard Poye:
Fantastic. Myra?
Myra Kressner:
Health Yes, so I don’t know if Richard, you were going to bring this up separately, but as I mentioned, some of our other Vision Groups have also been talking about the GLP-1 trend and the impact that, that is having on menus or consumer preferences and protein is certainly one that we’ve been hearing about. Is there anything that you could talk about that you’ve been seeing in the last, say even a month, three months, six months, what seems to be exploding that’s being impacted by the GLP-1s?
Claire Conaghan:
We of course have research on it, but there’s not that much hitting directly from a menu item standpoint that I can necessarily say is calling out. I think it ends up being we do see that protein, it’s across all consumers, not necessarily just those on GLP-1. Of course everyone loves protein, but there’s the highest value scores are anything that features a large amount of protein no matter if it’s necessarily more than would normally be on there. The choice of protein has been a top growing term on menus, just like the word protein as sides where you get to pick your protein. But I can’t think of anything else like top of mind.
Richard Cashion:
Yes, Eva?
Eva Strasburger:
Associated with that question, our members on our Convenience Leaders Vision Group were talking about how if you are on a GLP-1 drug, it turns you off fatty foods, so anything that’s like fried chicken, maybe you should think about introducing rotisserie chicken. And so they were seeing some success by offering protein but not in a fried form, and that is why there’s been an increase in interest in rotisserie type chicken at convenience stores. Another question though I had with that, a different question that I was going to ask you, Claire, is also the discussion about cannibalization. Do you track when you introduce a new food item, whether that is attracting new customers or whether it is just cannibalizing your present customers from what they already like on the menu?
Claire Conaghan:
We don’t have that necessarily in the tool. Those we’ll do for custom studies, but we don’t track that.
Eva Strasburger:
Okay.
Richard Poye:
I’m going to ask Joe a question. Joe’s at a store that’s being built right now, so I’d like to ask him a question before he has to dive into handling something else. I know that you’ve got a mix between travel centers and non-travel centers, and so I would think the trucker menu is very different from maybe the traditional convenience. Are you approaching that in different ways as far as the type of menu that you develop and are you seeing differences from that perspective as far as the menu you offer?
Joseph Brumfield:
Strategy Well, I don’t think so Rich. I think we, again, I’m not the food service guy, my focus is on the beverages, but obviously I see what we do every day and really our menu, whether it’s in our truck stops or even in our convenience stores, is really taco, I’ll call it taco-centric, right? We really have a real high concentration on the Mexican menu, Mexican palate, and we do offer chicken sandwiches and burgers and pizza, but the real draw and the focus that we have is on Mexican plates and tacos and I think in our particular demographic, it just kind of rolls across everybody, whether they’re truckers, whether they’re travelers or whether they’re the local people. I don’t think you can really delineate and say we’ve got to have something for the truckers. I think it’s all of our customers are the way we look at it.
Richard Poye:
Yes, in South Texas it is soft tacos. If people have three tacos, they get three different types. Sometimes they also get three different types of salsas, so it’s an easier mix versus if you go get an entree. Thank you, Joe.
Sarah, you had your hand up there?
Sarah Jenks:
Thank you. This question would be for some of our operators. I see a lot of times or something I hear a lot is when someone’s going to experiment with a new trendy item, you obviously want to get that out and Claire, we heard some great tips from you about roughly how long it takes to see is it successful or not, so then we want to stop whatever that LTO is. But the reality is a lot of times you’re all faced with the inventory challenge, so it’s fun to experiment, however, inventory can be very expensive and that can eat into your profit. So I’m curious if any of you have tips or best practices for each other on at what point does that experimentation stop for you? How do you manage the inventory so you can still play and get these things out there, but you also don’t cannibalize all those great sales that you had?
Barbara Kessler:
For Dash In we have somewhat of a unique menu for convenience. We are more of a scratch kitchen, so we don’t use a commissary. We’re making sauces and doing things fresh in each location. That does make life a little bit easier for us, so when our chef comes up with something new and unique, as long as it’s what I call out of the same box of Legos that we already have and it’s just creating a new something, that we can move on very quickly. When it involves, like someone said it earlier with the Korean sauce, sauce is a lot easier to find. If you search the supply chain far enough, you’re probably going to be hard-pressed not to find a sauce that’s pretty close to what you’re looking for, but to find somebody that can mass produce, say a chicken that’s infused with those flavors is going to be very challenging. So for us, we will move rather quickly on some of those things and to make sure it’s actually going to last because we’ve gotten burned a few times.
Our stores are in the Mid-Atlantic, we have this weird little bubble of the world where we’re not quite north enough to be truly exciting. We’re not quite south enough to be “south.” So we will test some of the newer concepts and new flavor trends in some of our key locations, our super, super busy locations where we know we can pull it off easily just to see, get some initial key reaction and then if it’s worth it, then we’ll turn around and figure out how to get it into the rest of the stores. That’s been where we’ve found success. In years past, we were like, oh, this is going to be great. This particular product’s going to go off the shelves. It’s trending really high and we’ve eaten tons and tons of product at the supply chain level because it just never went. So for us, we like to test small and then go big if it has initial catch, if you will.
Richard Poye:
I’m going to pivot on over to Heather. And when you think about Parker’s Kitchen, they’re known for their fantastic fried chicken program. Like you said, they’ve just opened their hundredth store and they’re expediting the growth of more stores, but having such a core menu offer, how does that impact your menu development in the other items like maybe the side items or those types of things in your store?
Heather Davis:
Yes, so we want to make sure that everything we offer, our teams can consistently execute perfectly. And so the smaller your menu is, the more effective your team is going to be at that. And like Barbara said, I mean keeping the same Legos. If we’re going to do a new sandwich, if you’ve got sausage and bacon, put bacon and sausage on a breakfast biscuit and elevate that, you can get a higher price point. And then we really aren’t adding SKUs, we’re just increasing some usage of those, but it’s very easy to move something like that in and out. But we really try to keep to our core, and a majority of our approach when we’re talking about innovation is enhancing the quality of the items that we already offer. And so last year we made a significant change to how we bread our chicken because we wanted it to be crispier and juicier.
And so all of those things, we’re working on things like that to enhance our menu and then working on some marketing messaging so that we get credit for the food that we offer. I think as an industry, we don’t do a good enough job at marketing what we sell to actually get the credit for the hard work that we’re doing or the quality of the food that we offer. And so we’re really focusing a lot of efforts around that right now and then trying to move into the pizza space because I think pizza offers a great way to have some uniqueness and kind of play with some different things from a toppings perspective to just be able to keep some of that excitement alive around people talking about your menu and the fact that you have food.
Richard Poye:
That’s smart. I mean, it’s focusing on your core for success. And some brands can get distracted too easily by trying to have too much innovation and they don’t have the trust yet from the guest coming into the store.
Heather Davis:
Yes.
Richard Poye:
So that’s smart.
Heather Davis:
And we look at QSRs. I mean, if you look at the two fastest growing chains, you’ve got Wingstop and you’ve got Raising Cane’s and their menus are extremely limited. Wingstop is playing on sauces, Raising Cane’s is just focusing on quality in their Cane Sauce. And so there’s something to be said about these guys that are growing at a really high pace. They’re not trying to be everything to everybody. They’re focusing on what they’re great at and then they’re telling their story.
Jon Cox:
It’s a good call because when I was down in Florida, we went to see the Saucy [by KFC] concept in Orlando, same thing, right? It’s one wing, it’s one tender, one fry, one roll that’s designed to fit the tender and 11 sauces. And it was amazing because you go in and they have the menu board up, there’s six people in the drive-thru. My wife and I are both the two oldest people in the building at both less than 50, but still the two oldest people in the building and 19 to-go orders on DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats that were waiting to be picked up. It was just incredible the amount of volume they were doing. And it’s all to Heather’s point, it’s all around the sauces. It’s really easy to get a good quality product and then to differentiate with the sauce.
Richard Poye:
Stephanie, first time I went to one of your stores, you offered a lot of options and you’re doing a lot of building everything in store. I mean, if you haven’t been to one of the stores yet, you all better go, because I think it’s very fascinating to see how they’ve built up a food program. You’re looking at many cases from an operator’s COO lens. So from an operations team perspective, when you’re implementing these new menus and new ingredients and those types of things, what do you think works really well and what doesn’t as far as from an operations team perspective?
Stephanie Galentine:
Well, I’m happy to hear Heather comment on making it simpler because that is probably our number one struggle that we have. We have really good food and we have too large a menu, and our teams have taken some credence with that, so they’ll make it the way they like it. And I’m sure that I’m not saying what others haven’t experienced before, but we are actually looking to streamline and use our ingredients more thoughtfully and thoroughly and everything from point forward. When you talk about technology related too, everything costs more with a menu our size and our output and our operations are more difficult.
One of our main leading initiatives this year is to make it easier for our team so that we have a consistent product that goes out of all 15 locations. The customers can trust what they’re going to get. And that’s going to be a big challenge for us because we’ve added, added, added over the last decade plus and we haven’t refined or really even analyzed how many per store per day, so we have a lot of work ahead of us, but hearing some of the comments made by this panel just validates that we’re going the right direction.
Richard Poye:
Richard, you’re doing a lot of things. You have very robust sales from a beverage program point of view. We’ve talked about menu development, though thinking from developing a beverage menu, how are you approaching that?
Richard Cashion:
We do a few different things. We’re nimble, so we can respond to trends a lot faster. And we’re able to really respond and we don’t have a lot of investment in the supply chain, but when you look at our business on the inside, over 65% is beverage and food, and so where our typical c-store got a margin around 40, we’re hitting those sixties very easily. Our drive is to increase our margin all day long.
Richard Poye:
In your units when we talked once, I was surprised by the volume of dispensed beverage you did, and if you could talk about that, that would be good.
Richard Cashion:
Beverages Strategy Yes, just the amount. I mean, when you break it down and you look at our happy hour promotions for our beverage section, our loyalty customer on average is in our store now at 8.5 times a week. So they may come in and grab a beverage, two to four times a day. We have one customer that’s in over 40 times a week, and it’s just amazing. They’re in there like 10 times, four days a week, and they just come in for the beverage. And so we do a lot of proprietary beverage LTOs on our tea and our in-house coffees and our cold coffees. There was a question on cold brew earlier. We found that four to five flavors of cold brew are better than one flavor of cold brew from a sales perspective.
So we switch out, seasonal trends vary a lot, and we’ve got one or two great baristas that are on the ground level, and they come up with a lot of our LTOs and trends, and we just make it a team environment to kind of get ahead and see what people are producing in their drinks. We know our customers, they can modify their drinks quite a bit, so we tend to lean on what customers are doing and then follow influencers on that. We just educate our guests. And then old school selling, we upsell everything. We offer fresh cut fruit and everything we do on our finishing bars, we’re redoing the finishing bars to ensure that we can create a blend that from our made to order beverage program you don’t really see a difference if you want to make your own out on the floor. So we’re going to do that kind of transition right now. It’s really just driving beverage. Beverage is the biggest part of our business. Food is growing to be that, and now that we have a fuel store, we look at fuel really driving people inside the store to have a QSR experience or to experience a different trend.
Richard Poye:
Great.
Richard Cashion:
On the pizza demographic I just want to point out our third-highest pizza is dill pickles. We took it off the menu and got threatened by some customers if we didn’t bring it back. We had to bring dill back and the Nashville hot had to go off the menu, so I would say in this part of Texas, they took dill pickle pretty seriously.
Richard Poye:
Thank you, Richard. I’m going to switch on over to Kris. I think Kris, you’re dealing with a very wide demographic, but it’s a very focused demographic, I would say, because you’re dealing mainly with Gen Z and then the faculty and the staff at the university. When you’re going to develop menus, what are some of the approaches that you are taking?
Kris Klinger:
Strategy I appreciate the conversation and Claire, great job on the presentation. I have so many questions and comments to add, but we really focus on developing concepts and we partner with national and local brands, as well as creating or developing our own brands. And so, we have an example in our convenience areas. We come up with what we think the students are looking for, and cold brew is obviously one of those. And we have cold brew wherever we can because our students are drinking quite a bit of it, and actually we even put it in our residential halls where it requires a swipe for the students to get in there, and they’re on unlimited meal plans. Despite the fact that they can get it when they’re in there for free once they pay the admittance fee, they still buy it all over the campus. What we’re looking at more than anything are the authentic flavors, but the handheld or portable piece is something that really is important to us with our students so they can take it with them.
We talked about tacos and whatever is handheld, the pizzas, pizza pockets, homemade pizza pockets and so on, is what we’re looking for. But we do find the authentic flavor profile and a lot of the flavors that Claire talked about is what our students are looking for. And we test some of that stuff out in the dining halls, and then we’ll create concepts based on the successes that we have in some of our retail spaces, as well as our convenience spaces. Then Heather mentioned Raising Cane’s and some of those brands that are doing really well, Wingstop and the simplicity of what they offer. Something that I challenge the group on, one is, it is a simple and limited concept. I’m from California, so you’ve got In-N-Out Burger. They’re killing it, too. Same thing, they’ve got a limited amount of items.
But the thing that these concepts have in common is the brand recognition. And I think that’s the piece that we all need to fight or overcome. If we don’t have a nationally or locally recognized brand, how do we get customers excited and interested in something that they really don’t know as much about? I mean, you go to a Raising Cane’s, you know what you’re going to get. We have a Raising Cane’s on campus. It’s one of our partners, and so you know what you’re going to get. We have a chicken concept we created as well in our food court, that does well and I would put the quality of the product up against Raising Cane’s. It just doesn’t have the Cane’s sauce. And we do the same thing in our dining halls. I mean, I can go on and on. And the other thing we’re looking at is just the convenience and the ease for the students to get what they want or the staff or the faculty. And that’s, like I said, we’ve been looking at the micro markets and the automated vending, or the enhanced vending where there are products out there we can create now. And we’re partnering with some sustainable package container groups where we create the product, we put it in a hot or cold holding vending machine, and then we’re vending that to our students so they can get it throughout the night. And particularly two or three in the morning when I would prefer our venues be closed, and I would prefer they’d be in bed, but they’re not.
We’re navigating all these different and unique spaces and environments and looking at it in so many different ways. But I think, to answer and tie it into what Claire shared with us, it is really those authentics, those flavors that they’re looking for. Our primary customer is our student. We still need to take care of our staff and faculty, so we try to find a way to make it a little more approachable sometimes so that they’re not off put. But at the end of the day, our primary customer is the student, and they are looking for authentic, they’re looking for bold flavors, and if it’s spicy, as long as they like spice, they love the spice, they love the uniqueness and so on. I know I went on a couple tangents and I could talk a bit more about it, but as far as it relates to this group, I hope I helped out a little bit.
Richard Poye:
That’s good. I appreciate it, Kris. And yes, you’ve got a challenging job because you’re dealing with all dayparts and age gaps. Fantastic.
Brandon, when we last spoke, or in our last meeting, you were talking about developing the beverage program and really focusing in on that and taking that forward. Can you tell us how you’re approaching that from a menu or an offer perspective?
Brandon Frampton:
Beverages Strategy So it’s still pretty wet, but what we’re looking to do, we’ve got about 150 locations, primarily in the Bay Area. There’s the usual suspects right here, from Cold Craft Beverages, and then on top of that there’s plenty of very unique, really awesome authentic places. But with that said, we’ve got great assets, and what I’m doing is going to take some of our top 10 in the Bay Area, 10 of those locations, and I’m going to blow out made- to-order craft beverages, so primarily cold. So we’re going to take that to full bright, and I really feel like we can compete pretty good, really good. I know we can get the flavors and all the taste there right if we market it well.
And candidly, for how high it indexes here, I mean, if we just catch what some of the others’ spill, it will be so successful I can’t believe it. So I think it’s going to be really unique in our space because we’ve got 10 chicken concepts, a pizza concept that they have a true MTO craft cold beverages. I’m pretty excited about it. So I tell you, we’re probably four months away. We’re not going to make summer, but we’ll make late summer, which is okay for California. So that’s where we’re headed. I think it’s going to work pretty well, but we’ll see. I think it’s got a lot of legs, so great margins, great pricing.
Richard Poye:
Great stuff. Well, thank you, Brandon.
I believe everybody’s had an opportunity to talk. I didn’t know if there were any additional questions for Claire. Or Claire, if you had questions back to us on some things, but I want to have a few minutes discussions for any questions around what we’ve heard and I want to leave about the last 10 minutes to cover a couple of points with everybody.
Okay. Well, if someone has a question before we get off the line, then I’m fine with that, too.
One of the things when I was looking at different trends, there was a piece around the flat croissant, and the flat croissant is something that at first I thought it was a little bit ridiculous, but then I really began to think about it from a carrier point of view. And I’ve seen the flat croissant go from a savory point of view where they’re brushing it with more chili and different other things, and I’ve also seen it as something where it’s been dipped in chocolate and far more falls into more of a pastry dessert type of a line.
Claire, you made me think about when you’re talking what’s old is new again, and different generations looking sometimes at the same thing. I didn’t know if anybody else was seeing things that they grew up with, but now a generation much younger is looking at it and thinking it’s a new thing. And also, when I’m thinking about saying what’s old is new again, I think about dirty sodas, and dirty sodas were something that were around when I was a kid, but we didn’t call it a dirty soda. So I’m wondering if people are seeing things that are something old is new again in their market. Okay. Ryan.
Ryan Blevins:
Yes, so both of those really, I mean, you hit on two that we are going to start doing. We’re going to start to put just a basic butter Belgian croissant in our bakery case for sort of the same reason you just touched on. I think it’s just classic. I think when you get to pick the right croissant that bakes up nicely it just has a really good, tall standing presence in a bakery case and sort of stands out. So we’re going to start doing that, and we’re going to attempt dirty sodas. It poses some challenges, because the way we’re going to attempt it is we’re going to put six syrups out on our fountain bar, and we’re going to build out six recipes. So hopefully, prescribed recipes where the customer comes over and, let’s say, grabs their large cup and puts Dr. Pepper in it, turns around to get a lid and a straw, and sees that there’s these syrups here and this creamer here. And rather than just sort of free handing it with trial and error, have some recipes that are posted either on the countertop, or on a sign that’s very visible, and steer them towards that particular recipe, two pumps of this, one pump of this, and then call it some fun name. And so, we’re going to give it a shot. I hope it works out, because everything that I’m seeing is that it’s popular now, and I think it’ll bring in a new consumer. It’s hard to sort of quantify other than just hopefully we get some new customers that want to come in and have some fun with our fountain bar.
Richard Poye:
Back to the flat croissant piece, there is a lot that you can do to innovate with dipping it in chocolate or brushing it with hot honeys and different things like that.
Ryan Blevins:
We’re playing around with it.
Richard Poye:
I’m seeing, Derek, you had a question or you want to say something?
Derek Thurston:
Yes, just jumping on what Ryan was saying, we’re going to take a shot at it, too. Same thing. Pumps the syrup out there, recipe cards, radio at the fountain, kind of direct. And we also had our local advertising agency shoot some shots. We had the soda go in, then the pump, the pump. So we’re going to put that on our digital board as well. We’re going to go after the dirty soda trend from the angle like, “Hey, you don’t have to pay six, seven bucks at a specialty shop. Come on into Cliff’s and make up your own soda.” And we’ll probably do some Instagram posts and just see what people can come up with. But I’ve gone to a few of the stores with the setup and just the engagement and the fun that the staff has with it is pretty exciting. So like with Weigel’s, we’re going to give it a shot as well and see what we can do with it this summer.
Richard Poye:
Okay. Another thing Claire, when you’re talking about the Indian pizza, and then the tikka masala and those types of things, just as a sidebar, I was in an Indian restaurant a couple of days ago here in D.C. and there was Indian-spiced popcorn. So it was taking something that was super basic, kind of Americana, and added butter, and then it had the different spices. Popcorn was an easy carrier. I’m not saying we’re going to do popcorn in convenience, but as an idea where people are taking one thing and doing something different and innovative with it.
So think about how we can take flavors and quickly introduce them because they’re just an extension of what we might already serve people. If you think about the hot honey or the Nashville hot chicken. Think about what could be next for chicken and it might be a Korean chicken. I think we can quickly begin to introduce flavors and maybe try it with different sides. And I think whether that’s within our side dishes, our main offer, breakfast, lunch, it really all goes back to does your customer trust that you can deliver? think there are certain stores that have their customers trust them, and there are other ones that they’re building that trust.
And so, I think as we look at the trust piece, that might be something we think about in our menu development — we may not have the permission from the guests yet to go to that extreme level. It might be more of a strategic plan to become more creative in our menu, but that doesn’t mean the guests would understand it.
All right, I’m going to pivot here. Claire, first of all, thank you very much for the deck and sharing the presentation today. I greatly appreciate it. It’s something that is very helpful for all of us, and I’m sure that everybody’s going to enjoy being able to review back and look at the deck when we share that.
Onto the next topic here, there’s two things that I wanted to go over with everybody here. One is, we have a big enough group now where there’s an opportunity where there may be things people can collaborate on in a more focused environment if they choose to do so. So we’re thinking about, how do we as a group leverage this community that we are building? There might be ad hoc research that people want to do together. This is not about me or Vision Group prescribing something, but it’s really about saying, “We now have this large group of people that spans coast to coast, north to south, midwest.” You think about it, we’ve got a big group of people where, in many cases, people aren’t competing with each other. And so, in a sense, how do you turn this into something that’s more of a share opportunity that we can leverage?
And if there are smaller groups, could be two people, it could be four, it could be more, but maybe pick a subject that’s relevant to your business, and then build off of that and come back and share with the group. I didn’t expect to come to any sort of final decision during this call on this, but it’s really about saying how do we combine forces and work on something that’s specific and that could be helpful to each one of your businesses?
And so, what might be the types of things that you’d like to do a deep dive into? If interested then groups can form, take whatever time needed, and ultimately create a better bond between the people within the group, and then share back to the broader group saying, “Hey, look, these are some of the insights that we’ve been able to uncover.”
I’ll send out an email to follow up, but would like everybody to consider topics that would be relevant to them, and then we can identify where there’s potential for future collaboration.
Myra, Roy, did you have additional comments from that point of view, or does that sound good?
Myra Kressner:
Sure. Yes, this idea actually came from further collaboration that we had with John Cox and Mike Weber a while ago. We think it’s a great idea if this is something that you are interested in doing. So, again, to Richard’s point, if this is something that two of you or more want to take a deep dive into. decide among yourselves if this is something that you want to do. This is not an additional assignment for you. Only if it’s something that you want to do, then decide what that is, and then get back to the group on what you have accomplished, and what you’ve learned from it.
Roy Strasburger:
Right. The only thing I was going to add is that Vision Group Network can provide a framework to help all that work out. Everybody on here is basically volunteering their time to participate, and we really appreciate that, but if there’s something that we can do to facilitate spreading more information, increasing the knowledge base of the industry, we’re very happy to help with that. If there’s a group of people who would like to do a deeper dive into a specific topic just please let us know. Let Richard know, he’s going to be point person on all of this.
Richard Poye:
Perfect. And then the last piece, about a-week-and-a-half ago, we had an opportunity in a separate group to really do a deep dive into the GLP-1 or the Ozempic type of drugs and how that was impacting repurchases, both from a household point of view, but also restaurants and to-go types of foods. And I’d have to say, I entered the meeting, not skeptical, but just not taking the idea that it was going to have that big of an impact on convenience. But I think that these types of drugs could have a significant impact to convenience, not just in the menu development and the types of menus that we have from a foodservice perspective, but the central store component as well. And so, one of the things that we were considering, it’s for the next topic for the next meeting, was really to do a deep dive around the data that’s been collected so far with GLP-1 drugs and the usage of that, and the impact on foodservice.
And I wanted to make sure that before we went down that path, that the group felt that it was something that they were interested in learning more about. I looked at it the first time and didn’t really understand how swiftly this one was moving as far as a trend and how broad it was. So it’s something that I think is relevant, but like I said at the first meeting I didn’t want to come in and start saying, “This is what we’re going to present,” but rather gather everybody’s interest on a subject.
Myra Kressner:
Derek, you’re shaking your head yes.
Derek Thurston:
Yes, I’m always interested in learning more about that and what effects it’s going to have on our menus, absolutely.
Myra Kressner:
Anyone else? Kris?
Kris Klinger:
Yes, and we’ve talked about it a bit in one of our other Vision Groups, but absolutely, I’d love to continue the conversation and hear what more folks have to say and what they think, especially once they learn and hear about some of the numbers and the impacts.
Richard Poye:
Is there anybody against it, or saying that they don’t think that’s relevant from a foodservice perspective?
Okay. We’ll look into identifying a speaker for that. As a pre-read, there’ll be a Vision Report coming out from the Convenience Leaders Vision Group probably within the month that showcases the discussions and the presentations they had around the subject. It has some great insights and I’d urge you to read it. I think that was mainly what we were going to cover today.
Eva Strasburger:
Do you want to say something, Robert, about the summit for November, the week of November the 17th, what you’re working on?
Robert Hampton:
Sure. Thank you, Eva. Just to let everybody know that we’re planning a summit for the week of the 17th of November, and we’re going to combine all of the Vision Groups together, bring them all in a virtual summit, so we’re not going to be going anywhere. It is a virtual summit where we’ll have all groups participating, including the Global Convenience Leaders Group. And so, we’re calling this a global summit, and we’ll have report outs from each group so you’ll be able to hear what all the other groups are talking about and some of the key takeaways for 2025 from the other groups, and then we’re going to have a report out from this group as well to share with the other groups.
So we’re looking to have a keynote speaker, possibly a panel at the end, and the report-outs. So I think it’ll be great for everyone to see what has been going on with the other groups, hear from the Global Group as well. We’re planning on it to be three hours, and again, it’ll be virtual, similar setup to this. So more to come on that, and look for a save-the-date coming out soon as well.
Myra Kressner:
Good.
Richard Poye:
All right. I think we’re good on time, and sometimes I know that it’s always good to give everybody back about five minutes in their day. Myra?
Myra Kressner:
Yes, we all want to make sure to thank all of you, as well as Jon with McLane, and Sarah with Upshop. Your participation is extremely valuable for the Convenience Foodservice Vision Group, so we appreciate that.
Richard Poye:
Thank you all very much.
Roy Strasburger:
Thank you, Claire. Great presentation.
Eva Strasburger:
Thank you.
Meeting Components
VISION REPORT
Menu Vision: Blending Tradition with Trend
Claire Conaghan Video Presentation
Claire Conaghan Presentation (PDF)
